I graduated from The University of Oklahoma with a PhD in neuroscience, and shortly thereafter joined the Kaczorowski lab as a postdoctoral associate. I am intent on leveraging genetically diverse mouse populations to uncover genetic and epigenetic mechanisms that govern organismal aging, and determine to what extent these mechanisms are acting in the brain to confer risk and resilience to Alzheimer's disease. Most of the known risk variants associated with Alzheimer's disease occur in non-coding regions in the genome and are proposed to influence gene targets that are (1) different than those classically been associated with, and (2) act in a cell type specific manner. I use single-cell technologies to characterize the effects of risk variants on their target genes and explore their influence on molecular networks associated with aging and Alzheimer's disease. My goal is test whether identified genetic variants alter the epigenetic landscape, and whether these variants can be targeted to delay or prevent age-related cognitive decline and dementia.

Niran Hadad on ORCID